Making predictions is always a crapshoot and I’m right about 65% of the time (just a bit better than a flip of a coin!) and have had some dismal failures, like when I predicted the Mall of America would fail miserably and it’s been a resounding success.

But FINALLY I kinda, sorta got one big one right. In a post on March of 2008 (Apple iPad: Would you buy a tablet-sized iPhone?) and again in one in April of 2009 (Apple “iPad” (or “MacbookMini”) is it *Finally* Coming?), I guessed rightly that it would be a big iPhone OS device as well as the name “iPad”. My prize for such a great set of predictions? Nothing since I was WAY off on my timing.

Now that Apple’s iPad stuff is up on their website, I can see that holding (fondling?) it will certainly make me crack open my wallet and take one of these puppies home with me when they ship.

Right out of college I worked for a consumer electronic manufacturer’s representative organization, Continental Merchandisers, Inc. (CMI) in St. Paul, and one of our biggest lines was Atari. My boss, Mike Kronstedt, made bushelfuls of money off of this explosive gaming system but some upstart named Apple had made computers and Atari wanted in on that action.

Above you’ll see the Atari 400 & 800 which were basically game machines. I did, however, do serious work on the 800 since it was the first machine that I ever played a genre known as “adventure games” as well as using “business applications” which were a text editor and a “budgeting program”. This experience with CMI, however, opened new doors for me as my next job was with the Apple Computer rep firm in Eden Prairie and set the course for my career in high tech.

Even I can’t believe how these were nothing but glorified calculators or slightly more elaborate gaming machines and is similar to how a high school kid today might feel using a rotary dial telephone.